David Lammy, in his new role as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and Secretary of State for Justice, has recently announced plans to tackle a long-running backlog of cases in the English & Welsh judicial system by severely narrowing the circumstances in which juries are used for deciding the verdicts in criminal cases, transitioning trials for less serious offences to relying solely on the judge. These plans are highly controversial, with detractors expressing suspicion that he will undermine long-standing principles of English constitutionalism as well as scepticism that the move will actually save any time or money.

Lammy has attracted particular ridicule for a comment in an interview that was reported in The Times two days ago:

I remember studying Bleak House for my A-levels, and the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case that went on and on and on. We cannot go back to a Victorian system in which all new people who are the victims of crime don’t get justice.

The 1853-2 novel Bleak House is a satire of the English court system of the early nineteenth century and is credited with spurring on reforms later in that century, but to use the Jarndyce case (or any of the real one inspiring it) as a justification for Lammy’s proposals is nonsensical as this was a probate case in the Court of Chancery (later succeeded by the Chancery Division in the High Court of England & Wales) not a criminal case, and crucially it did not involve any juries!

Then again, the Lord Chancellor is not the only one to fail to understand that story: Over recent years (well, decades really) there have been growing concerns among the intellectual classes that their own numbers may functional literacy among the populations of developed countries is going into decline. One particular alarm bell was sounded last year in A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities, entitled “They Don’t Read Very Well“, which used the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House as the yardstick. A worrying proportion of English majors (for whom reading literature should really be a specialist skill) struggled to understand it.

I listened to the LibriVox recording of Bleak House in 2022 and watched the BBC adaptation of it in 2024. I know from reading through Great Expectations that Dickens, being paid by the word, had a habit of using far too many when far fewer would do, but the idea that his works may be slipping out of human comprehension, even among those who have specifically chosen literature as a course of study, has implications which themselves are bleaker than the house could ever be.